John Menadue
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SARAH ANN WHEELER, EMMA CARMODY. Was the Government’s irrigation cash splash worth it? (The Advertiser)
One of us was born on a fifth-generation irrigated dairy farm in NSW; the other in a country town in the Murray-Darling Basin.
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CARDINAL GEORGE PELL. Where have all the fighters gone?
The future of George Pell is in doubt but his shadow will remain for many years across the Australian Catholic Church. Through a rigged system he was able to effectively decide who became bishops in the Church. This was critical in appointments to the two most senior archdiocese in Australia, Sydney and Melbourne. Both Archbishop Fisher of Sydney and Archbishop Comensoli of Melbourne owe their appointments to George Pell. They are his proteges,his proxies. Anthony Fisher aged 59 has 15 years remaining as Archbishop in Sydney . Peter Comensoli aged 55 has another 20 years to run as the supremo in Melbourne .They are both very much part of the problem in the Catholic Church rather than part of any solution. But both Archbishops are likely to cling to the trappings of office that George Pell secured for them.
See below an address by George Pell eight years ago on the type of church that he was trying to build in Australia. It casts a long and dark shadow.
He gave this address on ‘Authentic Catholicism vs Cafeteria Catholicism’ at the Catholic Voice Annual Dinner in Cork, Ireland on 29th July 2011. The following is the text of the address (slightly edited) from the current issue of the Catholic Voice newspaper.
John Menadue
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JESSICA CORBETT. Majorities of Both US Veterans and Public Believe Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘Not Worth Fighting’ (Common Dreams)
The polled groups also told the Pew Research Center that the U.S. military campaign in Syria wasn’t worthwhile
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JOHN MENADUE. Taxpayer subsidised Private Health Insurance is a political scam.
Stephen Duckett of the Grattan Institute has highlighted the growing and serious plight of PHI as more and more young people decide not to waste their money and are opting out of PHI. In response the CEO of NIB in a bizarre suggestion proposes that the government should ‘scrap Medicare and mandate private health cover'(AFR 23 July 2019). This is special pleading for a broken and terminal system.It would make things worse. He wants the government to save his failing industry despite a $12 b annual subsidy.
All the evidence shows that PHI is indefensible as to both equity and efficiency. Just look at the health disaster in the US. It is a wreck. (more…)
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VIC ROWLANDS. Israel Folau – a line in the sand.
If Israel Folau cannot find a way to qualify his homophobic interpretation of the Bible so that it does not cause hurt and offence to other people, his reputation as a person may well be the main casualty of his wilful disrespect. (more…)
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CHAULA RININTA ANINDYA. Should Indonesia accept Islamic State returnees? (East Asia Forum)
Indonesian former members of the so-called Islamic State (IS) stuck in Syria are now under the media spotlight. Many of them live in poor conditions, are struggling to make ends meet, expressing remorse for joining IS and pleading for the Indonesian government to repatriate them. The issue of how to handle them is now stirring debate on social media. (more…)
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J.A. DICK. Natural and Unnatural human rights
On Monday, July 8, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of an advisory commission: the “Commission on Unalienable Rights.” He hopes it “will provide the intellectual grist of what I hope will be one of the most profound re-examinations of inalienable rights in the world since the 1948 Universal Declaration.”
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GEOFF GALLOP. Effective public servants need nuanced understanding of politics, what drives their minister and government. Geoff Gallop offers eleven theses on Australian politics in practice.
Geoff Gallop is a former premier of Western Australia. Your minister cannot avoid dealing with the politics, so you should understand the ideas behind it, and the policy compromises they must make to secure alliances. (more…)
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BE SEO. Australia is turning into a car park for dirty vehicles (AFR 15.7.2019)
Australia’s most popular cars emit between 8 and 42 per cent more carbon dioxide than their UK counterparts, raising concerns that the country has become a parking lot for dirty vehicles.
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ELISE HARRIS. Persecuted Christians urge more action, fewer empty words
With global religious persecution increasingly thrust into the international spotlight, members of several Christian communities suffering violence and discrimination have said promises are no longer enough, but action is needed from political leaders.
Typically seen as a political non-priority, religious persecution, and anti-Christian persecution in particular, has been getting more attention since the 70th anniversary of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights was marked in December 2018.
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RICHARD BEASLEY The Murray Darling Basin Plan – Four Corners v Media Watch
Monday week ago, Four Corners aired “Cash Splash”. It concerned whether government funded water saving schemes (“efficiency measures” in the Basin Plan) have been a waste of money. Since the broadcast, the National Irrigators Council, and other lobby groups, have indicated they will lodge a complaint to the ABC. Subsequently, “Media Watch” suggested that Four Corners ignored “inconvenient evidence”. I disagree, but more of that later. (more…)
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PATTY FAWKNER, SGS. Chittister, Censorship and an Adult Church.
It was decades ago, but I remember the day and the conversation well. It was a Monday morning and I was returning to work at a Catholic adult education organisation after a short break. I was confronted with the news that, during my absence, our newly appointed director had removed copies of Paul Collins’ book, Papal Power, from the organisation’s bookstore.
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HAJO DUKEN. Brexit, preservation of the UK union and a deep and special relationship with the EU – two out of thre e ain’t bad (but far from certain)
Whenever we think that the level of absurdity in this drama cannot be exceeded, we are proven wrong. It appears that England (not the whole of the UK) has virtually decided that the earth is flat. Is a no-deal horror scenario now inevitable or is there a way out for the new Prime Minister?
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PERCY ALLAN. How to Avoid a Recession – why QI should replace QE
Both the IMF and the OECD say that monetary policy is largely exhausted so fiscal policy should now be used to ramp up economic growth held back by the triple Ds of high Debt, ageing Demographics and disruptive Digitisation (including robotics). Australia’s Reserve Bank has come to the same conclusion. (more…)
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MARTIN WOLF. Legacy of Bretton Woods is under threat (Financial Times 11.7.2019)
Trumpian populism is destroying 70 years of global economic co-operation. What can we put in its place? (more…)
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SUSAN CHENERY. A Repost: The Scribe: portrait of Graham Freudenberg, author of the speech that changed Australia (The Guardian 9 October 2018))
Legendary Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg was at the centre of power for more than 40 years. A new film sheds light on the man who wrote the script.
(This outstanding documentary will be telecast on the ABC on Sunday night July 14 ,2019 at 9.35 John Menadue)
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE. US Foreign Policy Is A War On Disobedience (Medium, 7 July 2019)
In an excellent new essay titled “We’re Not the Good Guys — Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action?”, Tom Engelhardt criticizes the way western media outlets consistently describe the behavior of disobedient nations like Iran as “aggressions”, but never use that label for the (generally antecedent and far more egregious) aggressions of the United States. (more…)
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GREG BARNS AND TONY NAGY: The Troubling Irony: The UK Government Conference on Media Freedom and Julian Assange
On Wednesday and Thursday this week The UK and Canadian Governments are hosting a conference called Defend Media Freedom. Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne is participating. Yet only a few miles away from the London conference venue Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks and journalist, languishes in Belmarsh Prison as he awaits a request by the United States to extradite him for revealing the war crimes of the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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KERRY BROWN. Whither ‘one country, two systems’? (East Asia Forum)
If reportedly a quarter of the population of the country or city where you live go out on the streets to demonstrate, there is a serious problem. We can quibble about whether it was indeed two million that demonstrated in Hong Kong on Sunday 16 June, or a half of that or less. But for once the eyes could not lie: the whole of the central area was crammed with people, many of whom had already been demonstrating only a few days before. (more…)
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JOANNE WALLIS. Australia’s one step forward, two steps back in the Pacific (East Asia Forum)
In 2016, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull expressed Australia’s commitment to a ‘step-change’ in its engagement with the Pacific Islands. The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper sketched the skeleton of this ‘step-up’ but it wasn’t until 2018 that those bones were fleshed out. While Australia is set to implement several meaningful labour mobility, security and diplomatic initiatives, simultaneously counterproductive domestically driven policies could undermine the ability of those programs to improve engagement with Pacific Island states. (more…)
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Thai police seize 51 Pakistani Christian asylum seekers (UCANEWS Reporter, Bangkok, 8 July 2019)
Thai authorities in Bangkok have arrested 51 Pakistani Christian asylum seekers in an incident that has reignited fears among the city’s Christian refugees of another immigration crackdown on illegal immigrants.
According to eyewitnesses, immigration authorities arriving in two police vans pulled up outside a low-rent apartment building in Bearing Soi 7 in eastern Bangkok where several Pakistani Christian families had been hiding out after having overstayed their tourist visas to Thailand. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Here we go again- attacking unions and ‘red tape’.
With no policy agenda and with the economy sagging, the Morrison government(‘We are the good economic managers’) intends to take us back to what Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey offered us six years ago, an attack on the trade unions again and less red tape. (more…)
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JOHN QUIGGIN. The Murray-Darling Basin scandal: economists have seen it coming for decades (The Conversation, 9 July, 2019)
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LEONID PETROV. “Love the North Korean Style: Alek Sigley’s Misfortune is a Coded Message”
Alek Sigley was expelled from North Korea for using the Internet
Last weekend the world was baffled by the statement of the (North) Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) which explained why Alek Sigley, the Australian student who had studied at the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, was detained, investigated and expelled. Nobody, including seasoned North Korea watchers, could make sense of this brief but eloquent statement that became viral among Western media even before it appeared on the KCNA official site. (more…)
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CHRIS MCDONNEL. A cry from the depths
It is often said that the darkest night comes in the hour before dawn. Recently the Church has passed, and is still passing through, a night time experience. We await the dawn hour.
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CAI FANG. A trade war will only hasten China’s structural reforms (East Asia Forum)
On 22 March 2018, the United States, invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act, increased tariffs on imported goods from China. Since then, the trade war has severely harmed both the Chinese and US economies. Yet despite 11 rounds of high-level negotiations between the two sides, the Trump administration has continued to escalate the trade conflict. The result has been an increase in tariffs on Chinese imports from 10 per cent to 25 per cent on 10 May 2019. China certainly did not want a trade war, it was launched unilaterally by the United States. But China was prepared for its escalation. (more…)
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GEETA PANDEY. Indian MP Mahua Moitra’s ‘rising fascism’ speech wins plaudits (BBC News)
A spirited turn at the mic by a first-time female MP in India’s parliament, in which she listed the “signs of early fascism”, has been hailed as the “speech of the year” on social media. (more…)
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TOM ENGLELHARDT. We’re Not the Good Guys Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action? (TomDispatch.com 2.7.2019)
Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here’s the first paragraph:
“American intelligence and military officers are working on additional clandestine plans to counter Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, pushed by the White House to develop new options that could help deter Tehran without escalating tensions into a full-out conventional war, according to current and former officials.”